


Long Live

by chambers_none



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-09 23:36:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chambers_none/pseuds/chambers_none
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They grow apart, after the war. The last big one.</p><p> <br/>Poof, and it's all gone. All they had is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Live

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this graphic, http://deanpendragon.tumblr.com/post/27522958480/long-live-the-look-on-your-face. Title taken by Taylor Swift's song of the same name. Much thanks to Ash for the beta!

In the end, when it's over-

 

They move apart, like pulling taffy into two halves: slowly, at first, then. 

 

It's a very good metaphor, Dean thinks, how the pieces still cling to each other. Of course, that didn't actually happen. He wished it did. In the end, they all went quietly, with their monthly calls petering out into never- they could never bring themselves to do it, he guesses. Not in the end, not when it was all over, and there was so much blood and too many memories entangled-

 

He gets a kid.

 

Well, that sounds like Dean purchased her at a Walmart. He didn't. He found Rosie next to her dead parents, on a hunt in Michigan (because wasn't that his problem, wasn't it, he could never stop hunting; it wasn't even the adrenaline or thrill of it all, anymore, because there was simply nothing _left_ ). He's a broken man running on routine, sue him. Sometimes he can almost see Sam, with his I Know Something face, the one that had got him all the way to Stanford, "Adrenaline is dangerous, but routine is lethal," because he'd quote that, something as dumb as that, look so proud while he did it. Just like when he was eight, and twelve, and thirteen, and sixteen: that had never changed. Sam had always been the smart one. He was wrong, Dean could never have made it to college. Hell, he'd barely scraped by with his GED.

 

His fingers scratch the Impala's seat a little too harshly when he tries to think of how differently his life could have gone if he'd pulled a Sam and gone to college, maybe. "Sorry, baby," he whispers to his steering wheel. The leather is cool against his forehead. Rosie is snoring quietly in the back.

 

That was two years ago. Now Rosie is almost four, and Dean has a girlfriend. A fiance. Well- he hopes so. If he's lucky. 

 

He doesn't know why he's doing this again. But then, the world's ended already, didn't it? It ended as many times as it possibly could. It can't end now.

 

Not now, please.

 

Fast forward four years. Dean has Rosie, now, and two boys: he names them Ben and John, with Lyanna's approval, and pretends they're not replacing _his_ Ben, and _his_ John. Because they aren't. They aren't replacements. 

 

He's not been hunting now, for three years. The grill is hot and he takes a deep breath. His shoulders don't throb. His hands aren't familiar with the motions of cleaning his guns anymore. The breath he takes smells, tastes like redemption. He feels like a drug addict triumphantly weaned off his cocaine.

 

The children grow up.

 

Nearly seven, now, Rosie, with Ben trailing two years behind, and John only four. John. The father that wasn't. Dean's been with his fair share of psychiatrists; not in his time with Lyanna, never, but on all those cases with Sam- that was all the shrinks seemed to love to talk about. "And how do you feel about that, Mr. Carter?" "What effect do you think your dad's absence left on you, Nick?" Fake names with fake stories. Except, sometimes, those stories were real.

 

John Winchester Jr., looks nothing like John Winchester the first.

 

He has almost the same chubby fingers, though that could be genuinely kid-chub, not the same make of his dead father's meaty ones. But any other similarities end there. The boys take after Lyanna, and Rosie isn't even his. 

 

Rosie looks more like Cas, actually.

 

She has nothing of Cas', not really, except sometimes, in certain lights, her eyes would be the same blue. But no one ever had Jimmy Novak's blue, so Dean guesses it's all projection. What a pathetic war survivor he turned out to be.

 

Right now, John Winchester, Jr., sifts through boxes and boxes. Ben helps as well, ever the diligent firstborn son. The both of them understand that even though Rosie is not their sister, Rosie _is their sister_. Ben ignores her seniority and parades about as the protector of their little trio, the caretaker. Holds John's hand to the playground and makes sure Rosie doesn't dehydrate. Dean carries the juice boxes and the lunches to the park, towing behind them, but it's Ben who takes charge and passes them out, makes sure everyone eats.

 

John's chubby fingers sift through photographs. Dean is too late to stop him.

 

"Whose this, Daddy?" He has a lisp. Dean closes his eyes, and tries not to look at the photograph, because that one fleeting, accidental glance has already burned it onto the back of his eyelids. They're posters, blown up, and taped to his retinas. It's like he's drowning, but too full of air as well. He's reliving the moment again, in his head.

 

The flash goes off. Dean doesn't wave his hand at it because it's not there. It's not actually there, it didn't happen. He is in the attic with his two sons, going through boxes of old stuff.

 

He is in Bobby's living room, arm around Jo and Sam. Jo is tossing her head back and laughing, twenty two years old and still innocent. Alive. The wallpaper is a god-awful red, the same ugly print that's been there for years, since Karen died and Bobby couldn't stand living in the same house that was carefully loved and moulded by her hands. Bobby is in a wheelchair. Sam is next to him. Ellen Harvelle has her back bowed in front of him, her mouth shaped around a laugh, the kind that came from deep in your belly and carried over the sound of everything. 

 

Cas is there.

 

"Who are they?" There's a tug on his sleeve.

 

Cas is not there.

 

"Uh, see," and here, Dean's voice cracks. He is almost fifty, and he does not have a best friend. Jeremy and Noah at work are nice enough, but. It's not Cas. It's not Sam. It's not Bobby, with his ever-present beer stink, the smell having seeped through into his clothes a long time ago. It's not Jo. It's not Ellen. It's not Charlie, grinning at him through her tears one last time, mouthing "Queen", with a leer and waggling eyebrows, like she wasn't about to die just out of his reach. 

 

"That was my best friend, Cas- Castiel." Dean wonders if Jimmy Novak's vessel has aged in all this time. Surely not. Cas would keep right on healing him.

 

"Then that's Sammy. Sam. He would have been Uncle Sam, to you."

 

"Where is he now?"

 

"Then, that's Jo. Jo and Ellen, here, Jo Harvelle and Ellen Harvelle. They, uh, were the most ba- That's Bobby. He was like my uncle, like my dad. He was so smart, so goddamn smart. Sam was too. He went to college, and everything."

 

Dean knows that things would have found their way to the first Apocalypse, eventually, but he still thinks sometimes, about how if he had never pleaded with Sam to follow him to look for Dad, would anything have changed?

 

He remembers, now. Now that he's finally being confronted with his past, the things he thought he'd forgotten, happy little things and other mundane moments that he thought he'd forgotten in the face of all the crap they had faced, came back.

 

"Dean, if we're not going to make it out alive-"

 

"Don't talk like that, man, you know I-"

 

"Dean. Listen to me. Promise me that- if you ever make it out, and if I- we don't. Promise me you'll tell everyone who'll listen, our legacy. Little kids and old folks and crazy people. I don't want people to forget me."

 

Castiel's voice had cracked in that last sentence. He'd been so human then. So extraordinarily human.

 

He had never promised him that, not even that little thing. God, he was a dick. His face creases up in self-hate, in disgust, in every negative emotion he had let himself stew in for forty years then tried to forget about in the next ten.

 

He wonders where Cas is now. Alone in Heaven, or alone on Earth?

 

He doesn't know which is worse.

 

Cas has no one. Nobody to tell their stories to.

 

But Dean does.

 

Dean lets his eyes flutter close for half a second, then begins to talk.

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic, I've imagined the're some last Great Apocalypse that they fought and averted once again, only there's death all around, obviously: Sam's dead, and so is almost everyone else. I kind of figured that they killed all the angels and the demons and Heaven and Hell are empty wastelands, so, yeah. Let's stick with this. I'm very selfish and very good at pretending things. 
> 
> Also, yes, I know the pictures were burned like two days after they were taken, but for this fic let's just pretend that that did not happen, and what with everyone dying around him, Dean was the sole inheritor of the pictures.


End file.
